EA 2020

In one sense, decorating a home theater room is much easier than ensuring that your home theater audio system will sound good in that room. With the room’s décor, at least you can see what’s wrong and make changes accordingly. With the room’s acoustics, however, not only can you not see the problem, but, in all likelihood, the problem is different from every listening position in the room.

The home theater system has an equalizer, but equalizers are suitable for fixing problems with room acoustics, unless there is only one chair in the room and only one listener will ever be in it at one time. Otherwise, any changes you make to the tonal balance of the system to correct for one listening position, will likely make things worse everywhere else.

Instead, your goal should be to remove any effects caused by room acoustics to the extent possible so that the true sound of your audio system reach every point in the room unaltered by the shape of the room and the surfaces within it. Typically, that means installing some room acoustic treatments. The selection and installation of room acoustic treatments doesn’t require a tremendous amount of expertise. With just a little advice from the company from which you purchase the materials, you’ll be able to handle the job yourself.

Adding room acoustic treatments doesn’t have to be expensive either. Depending upon the level of acoustic issues your room presents you may need only a couple of acoustic wall panels or a pair of corner bass traps to bring your room’s acoustics up to par. More difficult rooms may require additional treatments.

One typical problem is the presence of sheet metal ductwork above the ceiling or within or along the walls. This is especially common in home theater rooms that are built in the basement of the home. These thin sheet metal panels tend to vibrate at one specific resonant frequency whenever your audio system hits that certain note. By padding the outside of the ducts with acoustic insulation, these resonances can be reduced to the point where they are no longer audible in the room.

Another common problem is the lack of vocal intelligibility. Solid wall surfaces, window glass, hardwood floors, and smooth ceiling surfaces tend to increase this problem by providing highly reflective surfaces within the room. These surfaces create echoes which are directed back into the room toward the listeners. Each surface will not only create an echo with a slightly different delay, but will also reflect the sound waves selectively. That is to say different frequencies may be reflected from different surfaces with varying efficiencies, resulting in an unnatural tonal balance that is fatiguing to the ear and which makes it more difficult to understand the voices, especially during quiet passages of the movie.

By covering the most offending wall surfaces with acoustically absorbent materials, the majority of these distorting echoes can be eliminated. In the case of large glass windows, heavy drapes can be used to great effect. In most home theater rooms, you’ll want the windows covered to reduce the ambient light in any case so this is a given for many home theater rooms.

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